Back when I made the video below, the Gmail app for iPhone and iPad had a genuinely annoying bug: once you started selecting emails with the checkboxes, scrolling down the list would just freeze. You could only select whatever was already on screen. Even at the time, I noted I was seeing it less often — and going by Google’s current documentation, the way multi-select works now has changed enough that this specific freeze isn’t something I can reproduce in the current process.
How multi-select actually works now
The checkbox-first approach from the old video isn’t how the current Gmail app selects messages. Here’s the current method, straight from Google’s own instructions:
- Open Gmail on your iPhone or iPad.
- Tap the sender’s profile image on the left of a message — that’s what puts you into selection mode.
- Scroll down to find more messages and tap their profile images too.
- To select everything, tap the checkbox next to Select all at the top left. If you scroll further, tap Select all again to pick up the rest.
Because selection is now tied to tapping individual profile photos rather than a global checkbox mode, scrolling while you select just works — there’s no separate “frozen list” state for it to get stuck in the way the old version could.
If the Gmail app is acting up in general
None of this means the app is bug-free — it’s still an app, and apps still glitch. If yours is genuinely frozen, unresponsive, or behaving strangely, the standard fixes still apply, in order:
- Force-close the app (swipe up from the app switcher) and reopen it.
- Restart your iPhone or iPad.
- Delete and reinstall the app — this clears out any corrupted local cache without touching your actual email.
- Check the App Store for a pending Gmail update. Google ships fixes for exactly this kind of thing regularly.
The original video (circa 2013)
Leaving this here for context — it documents the specific checkbox-freeze bug as it existed at the time, not the current app.
